TOP500


The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
The most recent edition of TOP500 was published in June 2025 as the 65th edition of TOP500, while the next edition of TOP500 will be published in November 2025 as the 66th edition of TOP500. As of June 2025, the United States' El Capitan is the most powerful supercomputer in the TOP500, reaching 1742 petaFlops on the LINPACK benchmarks. As of submitted data until June 2025, the United States has the highest number of systems with 175 supercomputers; China is in second place with 47, and Germany is third at 41; the United States has by far the highest share of total computing power on the list. Due to secrecy of the latest Chinese programs, publicly known supercomputer performance share in China represents only 2% that of global as of June 2025.
The TOP500 list is compiled by Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and, until his death in 2014, Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany. The TOP500 project also includes lists such as Green500 and HPCG.

History

In the early 1990s, a new definition of supercomputer was needed to produce meaningful statistics. After experimenting with metrics based on processor count in 1992, the idea arose at the University of Mannheim to use a detailed listing of installed systems as the basis. In early 1993, Jack Dongarra was persuaded to join the project with his LINPACK benchmarks. A first test version was produced in May 1993, partly based on data available on the Internet, including the following sources:
  • "List of the World's Most Powerful Computing Sites" maintained by Gunter Ahrendt
  • David Kahaner, the director of the Asian Technology Information Program ; published a report in 1992, titled "Kahaner Report on Supercomputer in Japan" which had an immense amount of data.
The information from those sources was used for the first two lists. Since June 1993, the TOP500 is produced bi-annually based on site and vendor submissions only. Since 1993, performance of the ranked position has grown steadily in accordance with Moore's law, doubling roughly every 14 months. In June 2018, Summit was fastest with an Rpeak of 187.6593 PFLOPS. For comparison, this is over 1,432,513 times faster than the Connection Machine CM-5/1024, which was the fastest system in November 1993 with an Rpeak of 131.0 GFLOPS.

Architecture and operating systems

While Intel, or at least the x86-64 CPU architecture has previously dominated the supercomputer list, by now AMD has more systems using that same architecture on top10, including 1st and 2nd place. And Microsoft Azure has 8 systems on top100, thereof only two with Intel CPUs, including though its most performant by far in 4th place. AMDs CPUs are usually coupled with AMD's GPU accelerators, while Intel's CPUs have historically been very often coupled with NVidia's GPU, though current Intel's third place system notably uses Intel Data Center GPU Max. Arm-based system are also notable on the list in 4th, 7th and 8th place and in total at least 23 not just from Fujitsu that introduced Arm-based the top spot; Nvidia has others with their "Superchip" CPU, not just GPUs.
, all supercomputers on TOP500 are 64-bit supercomputers, mostly based on CPUs with the x86-64 instruction set architecture, 384 of which are Intel EMT64-based and 101 of which are AMD AMD64-based, with the latter including the top eight supercomputers. 15 other supercomputers are all based on RISC architectures, including six based on ARM64 and seven based on the Power ISA used by IBM Power microprocessors.
In recent years, heterogeneous computing has dominated the TOP500, mostly using Nvidia's graphics processing units or Intel's x86-based Xeon Phi as coprocessors. This is because of better performance per watt ratios and higher absolute performance. AMD GPUs have taken the top 1 and displaced Nvidia in top 10 part of the list. The recent exceptions include the aforementioned Fugaku, Sunway TaihuLight, and K computer. Tianhe-2A is also an interesting exception, as US sanctions prevented use of Xeon Phi; instead, it was upgraded to use the Chinese-designed Matrix-2000 accelerators.
Two computers which first appeared on the list in 2018 were based on architectures new to the TOP500. One was a new x86-64 microarchitecture from Chinese manufacturer Sugon, using Hygon Dhyana CPUs and was ranked 38th, now 117th, and the other was the first ARM-based computer on the list using Cavium ThunderX2 CPUs. Before the ascendancy of 32-bit x86 and later 64-bit x86-64 in the early 2000s, a variety of RISC processor families made up most TOP500 supercomputers, including SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha.
All the fastest supercomputers since the Earth Simulator supercomputer have used operating systems based on Linux., all the listed supercomputers use an operating system based on the Linux kernel.
Since November 2015, no computer on the list runs Windows. In November 2014, Windows Azure cloud computer was no longer on the list of fastest supercomputers, leaving the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's Magic Cube as the only Windows-based supercomputer on the list, until it also dropped off the list. It was ranked 436th in its last appearance on the list released in June 2015, while its best rank was 11th in 2008. There are no longer any Mac OS computers on the list. It had at most five such systems at a time, one more than the Windows systems that came later, while the total performance share for Windows was higher. Their relative performance share of the whole list was however similar, and never high for either. In 2004, the System X supercomputer based on Mac OS X once ranked 7th place.
It has been well over a decade since MIPS systems dropped entirely off the list though the Gyoukou supercomputer that jumped to 4th place in November 2017 had a MIPS-based design as a small part of the coprocessors. Use of 2,048-core coprocessors made the supercomputer much more energy efficient than the other top 10. At 19.86 million cores, it was by far the largest system by core-count, with almost double that of the then-best manycore system, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight.

TOP500

, the number one supercomputer is El Capitan, the leader on Green500 is KAIROS, a Bull Sequana XH3000 system using the Nvidia Grace Hopper GH200 Superchip. EuroHPC's JUPITER became Europe's first system to reach the exascale milestone. In June 2022, the top 4 systems of Graph500 used both AMD CPUs and AMD accelerators. After an upgrade, for the 56th TOP500 in November 2020,
Summit, a previously fastest supercomputer, is currently highest-ranked IBM-made supercomputer; with IBM POWER9 CPUs. Sequoia became the last IBM Blue Gene/Q model to drop completely off the list; it had been ranked 10th on the 52nd list.
Microsoft is back on the TOP500 list with six Microsoft Azure instances, with CPUs and GPUs from same vendors, the fastest one currently 11th, and another older/slower previously made 10th. And Amazon with one AWS instance currently ranked 64th. The number of Arm-based supercomputers is 6; currently all Arm-based supercomputers use the same Fujitsu CPU as in the number 2 system, with the next one previously ranked 13th, now 25th.
Rank Rmax
Rpeak
NameModelCPU coresAccelerator coresTotal cores InterconnectManufacturerSite
country		YearOperating
system
1 1,809.00
2,821.10		El Capitan[Cray | HPE Cray EX255a]1,080,000
10,260,000
11,340,000Slingshot-11HPELawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2024Linux
21,353.00
2,055.72		FrontierHPE Cray EX235a614,656
8,451,520
9,066,176Slingshot-11HPEOak Ridge National Laboratory
2022Linux
31,012.00
1,980.01		Aurora HPE Cray EX1,104,896
8,159,232
9,264,128Slingshot-11HPEArgonne National Laboratory
2023Linux
4 1,000.00
1,226.28		JUPITERBullSequana XH30001,694,592
3,106,752
4,801,344Quad-rail NVIDIA NDR200 InfinibandAtosEuroHPC JU
, Jülich, 		2025Linux
5561.20
846.84		EagleMicrosoft NDv5172,800
1,900,800
2,073,600NVIDIA Infiniband NDRMicrosoftMicrosoft
2023Linux
6477.90
606.97		HPC6 HPE Cray EX235a213,120
2,930,400
3,143,520Slingshot-11HPEEni S.p.A
, Ferrera Erbognone, 		2024Linux
7442.01
537.21		FugakuSupercomputer Fugaku7,630,848
-7,630,848Tofu interconnect DFujitsuRiken Center for Computational Science
2020Linux
8434.90
574.84		Alps HPE Cray EX254n748,800
1,372,800
2,121,600Slingshot-11HPECSCS Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
Switzerland|size=14pxEUFINEUITAsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsndsnd

Top countries

Numbers below represent the number of computers in the TOP500 that are in each of the listed countries or territories. As of 2025, United States has the most supercomputers on the list, with 171 machines. The United States has the highest aggregate computational power at 6,626 Petaflops Rmax with Japan second and Germany third.
Country or territoryNumber of systems
United States

Other rankings

Country
/
Region
United States

Fastest supercomputer in TOP500 by country

Country/TerritoryFastest supercomputer of country/territory Rank in TOP500Rmax
Rpeak 		Site
United States

Systems ranked

By number of systems as of 2025:
Note: All operating systems of the TOP500 systems are Linux-family based, but Linux above is generic Linux.
El Capitan is the system with the most CPU cores. El Capitan has the most GPU/accelerator cores. Aurora is the system with the greatest power consumption with 38,698 kilowatts.

New developments in supercomputing

In November 2014, it was announced that the United States was developing two new supercomputers to exceed China's Tianhe-2 in its place as world's fastest supercomputer. The two computers, Sierra and Summit, will each exceed Tianhe-2's 55 peak petaflops. Summit, the more powerful of the two, will deliver 150–300 peak petaflops. On 10 April 2015, US government agencies banned selling chips, from Nvidia to supercomputing centers in China as "acting contrary to the national security... interests of the United States"; and Intel Corporation from providing Xeon chips to China due to their use, according to the US, in researching nuclear weaponsresearch to which US export control law bans US companies from contributing"The Department of Commerce refused, saying it was concerned about nuclear research being done with the machine."
On 29 July 2015, President Obama signed an executive order creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative calling for the accelerated development of an exascale system and funding research into post-semiconductor computing.
In June 2016, Japanese firm Fujitsu announced at the International Supercomputing Conference that its future exascale supercomputer will feature processors of its own design that implement the ARMv8 architecture. The Flagship2020 program, by Fujitsu for RIKEN plans to break the exaflops barrier by 2020 through the Fugaku supercomputer, These processors will also implement extensions to the ARMv8 architecture equivalent to HPC-ACE2 that Fujitsu is developing with Arm.
In June 2016, Sunway TaihuLight became the No. 1 system with 93 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark.
In November 2016, Piz Daint was upgraded, moving it from 8th to 3rd, leaving the US with no systems under the TOP3 for the 2nd time.
Inspur, based out of Jinan, China, is one of the largest HPC system manufacturers., Inspur has become the third manufacturer to have manufactured a 64-way systema record that has previously been held by IBM and HP. The company has registered over $10B in revenue and has provided a number of systems to countries such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Inspur was also a major technology partner behind both the Tianhe-2 and Taihu supercomputers, occupying the top 2 positions of the TOP500 list up until November 2017. Inspur and Supermicro released a few platforms aimed at HPC using GPU such as SR-AI and AGX-2 in May 2017.
In June 2018, Summit, an IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, US, took the No. 1 spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflop/s, and Sierra, a very similar system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, US took #3. These systems also took the first two spots on the HPCG benchmark. Due to Summit and Sierra, the US took back the lead as consumer of HPC performance with 38.2% of the overall installed performance while China was second with 29.1% of the overall installed performance. For the first time ever, the leading HPC manufacturer was not a US company. Lenovo took the lead with 23.8% of systems installed. It is followed by HPE with 15.8%, Inspur with 13.6%, Cray with 11.2%, and Sugon with 11%.
On 18 March 2019, the United States Department of Energy and Intel announced the first exaFLOP supercomputer would be operational at Argonne National Laboratory by the end of 2021. The computer, named Aurora, was delivered to Argonne by Intel and Cray.
On 7 May 2019, The U.S. Department of Energy announced a contract with Cray to build the "Frontier" supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Frontier, originally anticipated to be operational in 2021, was projected to be the world's most powerful computer, with a peak performance of greater than 1.5 exaflops.
Since June 2019, all TOP500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops.
In May 2022, the Frontier supercomputer broke the exascale barrier, completing more than a quintillion 64-bit floating point arithmetic calculations per second. Frontier clocked in at approximately 1.1 exaflops, beating out the previous record-holder, Fugaku. In June 2024, Aurora was the second computer on the TOP500 to post an exascale Rmax value, at 1.012 exaflops.
Since then, Frontier has been dethroned by El Capitan, hosted at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with an HPL score of 1.742 exaflops.

Large machines not on the list

Some major systems are not on the list. A prominent example is the NCSA's Blue Waters which publicly announced the decision not to participate in the list because they do not feel it accurately indicates the ability of any system to do useful work.
Other organizations decide not to list systems for security and/or commercial competitiveness reasons. One such example is the National Supercomputing Center at Qingdao's OceanLight supercomputer, completed in March 2021, which was submitted for, and won, the Gordon Bell Prize. The computer is an exaflop computer, but was not submitted to the TOP500 list; the first exaflop machine submitted to the TOP500 list was Frontier. Analysts suspected that the reason the NSCQ did not submit what would otherwise have been the world's first exascale supercomputer was to avoid inflaming political sentiments and fears within the United States, in the context of the United States – China trade war. Similarly, government agencies like the National Security Agency formerly submitted their devices to the TOP500, only to stop after 1998.
Additional purpose-built machines that are not capable or do not run the benchmark were not included, such as RIKEN MDGRAPE-3 and MDGRAPE-4.
A Google Tensor Processing Unit v4 pod is capable of 1.1 exaflops of peak performance, while TPU v5p claims over 4 exaflops in Bfloat16 floating-point format, however, these units are highly specialized to run machine learning workloads and the TOP500 measures a specific benchmark algorithm using a specific numeric precision.
Tesla Dojo's primary unnamed cluster using 5,760 Nvidia A100 graphics processing units was touted by Andrej Karpathy in 2021 at the fourth International Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition to be "roughly the number five supercomputer in the world" at approximately 81.6 petaflops, based on scaling the performance of the Nvidia Selene supercomputer, which uses similar components.
In March 2024, Meta AI disclosed the operation of two datacenters with 24,576 H100 GPUs, which is almost 2x as on the Microsoft Azure Eagle, which could have made them occupy 3rd and 4th places in TOP500, but neither have been benchmarked. During company's Q3 2024 earnings call in October, M. Zuckerberg disclosed usage of a cluster with over 100,000 H100s.
xAI Memphis Supercluster allegedly features 100,000 of the same H100 GPUs, which could have put it in the first place, but it is reportedly not in full operation due to power shortages.
After the onset of US-China Trade War, China has largely shrouded its newly online supercomputers and data centers in secrecy, opting out of reporting to the TOP500 list. This is partly driven by fears of being targeted by US sanctions placed on Chinese domestic suppliers.

Computers and architectures that have dropped off the list

is no longer on the list.
Although Itanium-based systems reached second rank in 2004, none now remain.
Similarly vector processors have also fallen off the list. Also the Sun Starfire computers that occupied many spots in the past now no longer appear.
The last non-Linux computers on the list the two AIX ones running on POWER7, dropped off the list in November 2017.